You know the old adage by now: ‘Go woke, go broke.’ It appears more and more consumers are noticing that brands are pursuing a social justice agenda in the hope of selling products. Up until now, this has been a relatively successful strategy, appealing to the consumerist millennials whose appetite for distraction and cheap credit can drive sales of the next thing to put on Instagram. Companies can tap into the insatiable desire of their customers for the next endorphin hit and neatly package it up with whatever the latest ‘collective good’ buzzword is on social media. Everyone’s happy – the company makes money, and the customer sleeps well at night as a result of playing their part in the latest virtue-signalling fad.
This is all well and good for short-term gain, but what happens when people start to see this for what it really is? Well, evidence suggests the tide is turning. Big brands are losing customers, sales and share price value.
As an industry, marketing and advertising have always generally been viewed as capitalism’s outlier thanks to their attracting more creative, ‘anti-establishment’ personalities. However, this has often worked to a company’s advantage by providing excellent cover; in seeking to sell their products by siding with the ‘little guy’ or participating in a ‘just cause’, they’re able to enjoy the benefits of capitalism while hiding behind a virtue-signalling shield.
One of the first examples of advertising that employed the power of protest can be found in a famous 1971 Coca-Cola commercial. It featured a mixed group of people singing “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” in unison to suggest that the sugary drink is something that brings people together and represents a wholesome, communal experience. The advert was hugely successful for Coke – this set the direction of travel across the advertising industry. All brands wanted a ‘peace’ of the action.
Fast forward 40-something years and we see this strategy repeated over and over again, but with increasingly sinister undertones. In 2017 we saw Kendall Jenner and Pepsi produce the ‘Join the Movement’ campaign that used images associated with the Women’s March and BLM protests – and this time consumers weren’t so impressed. The resulting backlash forced the adverts to be withdrawn.
Then we have Colin Kaepernick – fresh from kneeling for the national anthem. He fronted a Nike campaign which involved the training-shoe manufacturer urging us to: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Again, some consumers were put off and burned their Nike products in videos on YouTube.
Then came the infamous Gillette ad which told men they were toxic. In less than two minutes they managed to alienate huge swathes of their customers.
Recently, one of Britain’s best known investors, Terry Smith, attacked Unilever for its “ludicrous” focus on “agendas”, in a sign of growing frustration at big corporate companies championing fashionable causes. (One of Unilever’s brands is the ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, possible the worst offender when it comes to corporate virtue-signalling.) In his recent letter, Mr. Smith said: “A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has, in our view, clearly lost the plot.”
This is all about selling products by associating your brand with progressive causes. It is called purpose-driven advertising and it is becoming a preoccupation with marketing departments everywhere. They are obsessed with public virtue-signalling at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals.
Many people who work in marketing have been to university, and pretty much all of them did one of the humanities subjects. Unfortunately, the humanities are full of Marxist professors. The domination of universities by the Left, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, is well documented. These professors have been left unchecked to advocate identity politics and even go so far as to mark down students who don’t sign up to their divisive view of the world. This has been going on for years, and while most of us laughed when someone went to university to do ‘media studies’ (or something equally peculiar) it appears the joke was on us. All of these graduates went on to secure roles in ad agencies, publishing houses, marketing departments and numerous other institutions.
Marketing is there to drive awareness, understanding and sales of products. It does this best when it can get into the mind of the customer – really understand them – and then articulate the right message, at the right time, in the right context.
When designing the creative execution, the customer must be able to see themselves (usually tapping in to their aspirations). They need to feel an affinity with the product, and this includes the people advertising it. Why then has the advertising industry decided that all ads must be full of minorities rather than the majority of the population? Adverts are currently over-representing black, gay and transgender people. Why? Nearly 8% of people in the UK identify as Asian, so why are Asians so strikingly underrepresented in ads? Then we have the fact that white people make up over 86% of the population, and yet make up a far lower percentage of the characters in ads.
The more advertisers try to push the ‘equity, diversity and inclusion’ agenda, the less affinity consumers will feel for the product. We should be encouraging marketing folk to continuously challenge themselves, to strive to get the best results for their businesses, and continually adapt to the evidence of what works. I don’t think they should dogmatically insist that what does not make a profit is without value, but with new challenges on the horizon for the industry it is more important than ever to do what actually works.
It’s time to drop the woke nonsense and go back to what we do best. Not only for the sake of our reputation in the boardroom and for the millions of individual consumers being alienated by brands they used to trust, but for the sake of ordinary people who are being force-fed a divisive political ideology.
Lee Taylor is Managing Director of marketing agency Uncommon Sense.
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